Voter registration numbers increase by the thousands
Comet staff report

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita has released preliminary voter registration numbers for the upcoming May 6 Primary. County voter registration offices throughout Indiana processed thousands of voter registration applications over the last week.

The Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS), an electronic database that simultaneously links all of Indiana's 92 county's voter registration records, was created in 2006 in coordination with Secretary Rokita's office and all 92 counties. County input, testing, and use has been critical in developing and enhancing a system which complies with federal mandates and provides accurate voter registration data.

The system is also linked to the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration databases to help verify voter registration records. Additional data provided to the system from the Indiana Department of Health and Department of Correction assist local election officials in their efforts to remove the records of deceased and incarcerated voters. With these additional tools, the SVRS provides a dramatic improvement over the counties old, individual systems by keeping the voter rolls current and accurate, at the time the individual voter's information is input into the system. This approach has allowed the removal or inactivation of approximately 600,000 records from the rolls, which would otherwise clog up the system and lead to inaccurate results.

As of 5 a.m. on April 10,, SVRS reported a total of 4,260,783 registered voters, with over 52,000 applications still pending. Since the General Election in 2006, 332,679 Hoosiers have added their names to the voter registration rolls, including over 150,000 since the start of this year.

The voter registration numbers will continue to rise over the next few weeks as all of the applications are entered into the SVRS.